Wow, I had nearly the exact same interview process. Super aggressive to nearly combative recruiter (felt like I was being argued with the whole time), fizzbuzz question, left in a conference room alone for an hour for lunch, a few more questions then done.
I got an offer but turned them down because their recruiter was so crazy aggressive it made me feel that Netflix would be a very unhappy place to work.
From what I've heard from ex-employees (one a recruiter) the hiring/salary/firing process there is not well organized. People often make more than managers or more senior employees and large layoffs every year for the 'bottom 10%' make for some weird social dynamics.
As much as I respect and admire their technical processes there I'm not convinced it's really a good place to work.
Can you share the name of the recruiter? Just curious if that person is still working at Netflix.
I've been a happy Netflix employee for over 4 years and have never experienced a 'large layoff' event. All the layoffs I've witnessed were not a surprise for the people affected.
Senior engineers usually make more money than their direct managers, but I fail to see how that's an issue.
I'm guessing RayVR met with Patty who left Netflix 2 years ago. My interview with her was different but I guess it would depend on your background and what she was trying to determine. In my case it was mostly to see if I was going to be a good cultural fit since I was at the time working for Yahoo which had a completely different culture. To me that was an entirely reasonable thing to do. Actually the whole interview process was great, and it was one of the major reasons I chose Netflix over other companies.
The day after I took over the team, my director sat me down and said "I don't know if you've looked yet, but most of your engineers make more than you do. That's because they're incredibly valuable. Your number one job is to keep them happy."
In the last two years of managing this team, I've consistently gotten paid less than the top engineers on my team.
I got an offer but turned them down because their recruiter was so crazy aggressive it made me feel that Netflix would be a very unhappy place to work.
From what I've heard from ex-employees (one a recruiter) the hiring/salary/firing process there is not well organized. People often make more than managers or more senior employees and large layoffs every year for the 'bottom 10%' make for some weird social dynamics.
As much as I respect and admire their technical processes there I'm not convinced it's really a good place to work.